C.S. Lewis talked about how we excuse almost anything for the sake of humor. I’m sorry, but this is funny. It caught me so off-guard I almost swallowed my coffee wrong.
And this one … because it’s true (it is completely Biblical for a husband to stone his wife if she isn’t a virgin on the wedding night):
Those who believe in Christian Dominion Theology for the United States are no different than Islamic clerics that demand Sharia law be followed in everything from banking to personal relationships. The ability for social institutions, such as education and business, to exist separate from religious institutions is one of the reasons the past 150 years have seen the greatest rise in education and the standard of living humanity has seen in its entire existence. A middle class person lives better today than the nobility did hundreds of years ago with access to hot, running water, electricity, furnaces, air conditioning, automobiles, and a rule of law that provides due process.
A few weeks ago, I was reading a political message board where some commentators espoused their sincere belief that all of humanity’s problems will be solved when they succeed in implementing dominion theology. Intrigued, I began to research the concept. What I found was frightening. The only good news is that all mainline Christian religions have rejected dominion theology, although some, such as Focus on the Family, are accused of practicing a “soft” form if it.
In a nutshell, dominion theology is the Christian version of Islamic Sharia law where a group of delusional fanatics takes over the secular government and governs it exclusively by “the law of God”. The problem is, most of these people have woefully inadequate knowledge of history and fail to realize that one of the reasons the United States has been successful is because we avoided centuries of bloodshed over questions such as whether or not the bread in communion becomes the literal body of Christ or merely represents the body of Christ.
For example, if we were to introduce prayer into public schools, the Christian denominations can’t even agree on what is appropriate or proper. You’d have Catholics wanting to say a Hail Mary, born again Christians speaking tongues, and Orthodox Christians praying in Latin. Instead of learning literature, mathematics, history, and philosophy, students would spend all day in fights over whether or not the end times were near. That’s what families are for – to decide how (and in what) religion to raise their children, ensure that they get what they believe is a “good” foundational understanding of their theology, and then “train them up” in the way they should go. That is not the purpose of school. That’s like demanding people memorize the beatitudes at the DMV. That institution has a specific function that works best if left alone.
In its purest form, dominion theology holds that Christians should own the television networks, elect the government, and write the laws so that Biblical laws are identical to political laws. Thus, an unfaithful husband would be stoned, as would a gay teenager, rebellious children, and someone who had “heretical” beliefs and dared to question the wisdom of killing productive members of society.
Dominion theology, if it were to ever gain hold in the nation, would lead, unquestionably and inevitably, to some sort of genocide, just as it has in virtually every country where religion has been used as the basis of the court system. We would have, rather quickly I should think, our own version of “Saint” Thomas Moore burned English peasants for daring to possess a Bible in English, so they could read scripture for themselves.
I am more and more convinced that horsehoe political theory is the most accurate model that has yet to be developed in understanding the role of individuals and institutions in a society.
After we left St. Louis, I stopped by to visit family and spent an afternoon at my grandmother’s house having dinner, discussing politics, and Christianity in general. The conversation was great and had many of the same topics that the younger generation of Christians have been discussing on everything from abortion rights to international trade.
One of the things that came up was how often Christians spout scripture that they believe they know, yet have little or no understanding of where it occurs in the Bible, the cultural traditions of the times, or why it’s important in the broader scheme of the historical record. Most Christians don’t even realize that the Catholic Bible used for thousands of years, and the more recent Protestant Bible that became popular after Martin Luther rebelled against Rome, have different books in them! If you need a reference tool, see this site, which lets you look up every translation for any given verse.
A perfect case study is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and the often referenced sin of sodom. Please note that before we proceed, this has nothing to do with the current political debate – I’m not even going to go there right now. Instead, it is an easy to understand illustration using a story that everyone who grew up in a Christian environment should know and be able to understand instinctively, making it a perfect tool for explaining our criticism with the state of the collective Church in the United States at this moment in time.
The background: In Hebrew, the word Sodom means “burnt” and the word Gomorrah means “a ruined heap” so the names that we now use to refer to the cities must have been given after the disaster and not the original names used by the people who lived there.We also know that Sodom and Gomorrah were not the only cities God destroyed in this manner – Admah and Zeboiim were also destroyed in judgment (see Deuteronomy 29:23).
For thousands of years, the word “Sodomite” literally meant “someone from Sodom”, just as American means someone from the United States. In fact, the word “Sodomite” didn’t have any sexual connotation until the 13th century when the word came into the English language. Yes, you read that right … the definition didn’t come into existence until 1,300 years after Jesus Christ walked the Earth.
I think the worst part is that most Christians are so uneducated they don’t realize that sodomy includes oral sex, including oral sex among married couples (go pick up a damn dictionary). For centuries, man and wife, in the marriage bed, having oral sex was an unspeakable, filthy, abomination that required total repentance thanks mostly to the preaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed that sex should exist only for procreative means. Modern American culture, however, has conveniently forgotten this definition and now the same Christians that hold signs condemning sodomites go home and commit sodomy a few times a week, talking to friends and family about the holiness of their marriage bed. It’s baffling people stake their soul on a book that most of them aren’t even willing to read in its entirety (that’s one of the reasons that my freshman year in college, I worked by way through every word from cover-to-cover over the course of eight or nine months).
I'm a private investor, financial author, and business owner who was the first in his family to attend college, grew up in small farm town, and was determined to study successful men and women so I could retire in my 20's. This is my private blog that covers everything from religion, politics, tax policy, investing, web design, literature, music, and whatever else I feel like discussing. Continue reading ...
